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Thursday, Aug 11, at 4:07 PM. Eastern Time, an object estimated to be up to 73 meters in diameter will be within 614,400 kilometers from Earth, traveling at 11.37 kilometers per second, designated 2004 PZ19 on the NASA Website. I also understand that this estimated miss distance has been revised downward twice in the past two days. And, that the arrival of it has also been moved forward from the original NASA estimates.
August 10th news 0820 UTC — The Minor Planet Center has taken the unusual step of posting observations of a newly discovered near-Earth object in a Daily Orbit Update MPEC (Tuesday´s DOU) before issuing a discovery MPEC for it. A good preliminary orbit hasn´t been established yet for 2004 PZ19. From the orbit calculation that it does have, MPES is showing this to be a small object on a path that will bring it to about 1.7 lunar distances from Earth on Thursday.
After a time of ´silence´, discoveries of so-called ´minor planets´ came in a hurry today - astronomers detected at least 10 new objects in the last 24 hours. These discoveries are being reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) and being published on the so-called NEO Confirmation page.
Object AO89913 is very interesting. The MPC signed the trajectory at that point (08/07/04) with "***" which means the object will come close as 0.0027 AU or 1 Lunar distance in the following 100 hours. Beyond this object there are others which are also supposed to come ´close´ especially AO86297 because its trajectory has been confirmed and a MPEC bulletin with more information will be posted soon but at this stage I can tell you it´s also going to be a ´near miss´, 5 to 10 lunar distances is a first estimate.
